September 17, 2018
I (Dana) have been going after Mann and his hockey stick as a bunch of horse hockey ever since I became aware of it, because, among other things, it totally ignores the Medieval Warm period, when temperatures were warmer than they are now and a colony of Vikings, led by Eric Thorvaldson (a.k.a. Eric The Red, named for the color of his hair and beard, not his politics), settled and farmed southern Greenland -- something impossible to do these days. The fact that Mann discounts the Medieval Warm period makes him a totally dishonest man in my eyes and unworthy to be called a scientist.The Science and Environmental Policy Project produces a weekly newsletter on climate-related subjects, The Week That Was. I highly recommend subscribing to TWTW as the easiest way to keep abreast of climate news.
This week’s edition begins, not for the first time, with a famous quotation from Richard Feynman, one of the greatest of 20th Century scientists:
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory is falsified by observation, and therefore is wrong. Ken Haapala, SEPP’s President, explains. There is far more at the link, but I will try to excerpt enough to make the point comprehensible:
Ross McKitrick, Department of Economics and Finance, University of Guelph, and John Christy, Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville, have undertaken to identify a core hypothesis common to the climate models used by the IPCC and to test the hypothesis against the longest data set available that describes what is actually occurring.
Haapala reminds us that it was McKitrick who demonstrated that Michael Mann’s hockey stick was a hoax, because any random numbers fed into Mann’s formulas would produce–voila!–a hockey stick.
There's a lot more. For those of us who like to see the Warmiacs get spanked. here it is: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/09/climate-alarmism-fails-the-test-of-observation.phpIn weeding through the countless hypotheses to identify one common, major testable hypothesis, McKitrick and Christy used four criteria: measurability, specificity, independence and uniqueness.
***
They found: "Air temperature in the 200-300 hPa layer of the tropical troposphere meets all four test conditions, pretty much uniquely in the climate system as far as we are aware.†The 1979 Charney report and all five IPCC reports indicate that any CO2-caused warming will be amplified by an increase in water vapor, primarily over the tropics.As you probably know, a doubling of atmospheric CO2 arguably may produce a one degree C warming, which pretty much everyone agrees would be a good thing, especially as the additional CO2 would help to green the planet. In order to get the "catastrophic†into CAGW, you have to assume something else: that this one degree warming would produce significantly more water vapor in the environment. It is this hypothetical (but unobserved) water vapor that accounts for the overwhelming majority of the warming claimed by the alarmists’ models.
Thanks for the posting Dana; great piece!
It hits the nail on the head. The real argument here is not whether the planet has warmed in a very modest fashion, but rather over the nature of feedback mechanisms in our atmosphere. (The media and the Left distort our position into claiming we say nothing is happening and call it anti-science when in fact it is WE who are actually observing the data and drawing conclusions from them.)
The warmists point to Venus and say Aha! Feedback loops are obviously positive, as Venus was once much more Earthlike and is now very alien and far beyond boiling hot - in fact it has no water left at all, since it all boiled away. The Venusian atmosphere is almost all carbon dioxide, so it must be that co2 a-priori has positive feedback loops. But we can easily counter with Mars, which is colder than it should be and also has an atmosphere primarily carbon dioxide (ninety five percent.) Mars is trapped in a terrible ice age, the result of negative feedbacks.
Much of the Martian atmosphere is frozen at the poles as dry ice. When Mars warms that air sublimates and the atmospheric pressure at the surface doubles, leading to more dust in the air. It may turn to a planetary dust storm, which happens every so often. When it does the skies darken, the temperature drops, some of the atmosphere refreezes, and Mars returns to homeostasis.
In fact, when the dust storms his the planet loses atmosphere which it then must make up through outgasing. So Mars is all negative feedbacks.
Venus was and is quite different. Originally just below the boiling point of water, it probably had hot oceans which evaporated when the Sun (yes, the true driver of warming and cooling) heated up. Venus is much closer to that big atomic engine, and it also has some other uniquenesses that make it tend to build a big atmosphere; extremely slow rotation in a retrograde direction suggests it was probably hit by one or more objects, or somehow solar gravitation actually flipped the planet upside down (either thing would kneed the planet like dough) and with her thin crust was subject to extreme vulcanism. With her oceans boiling into the atmosphere the planet warmed a lot before losing the water, and then extreme volcanic activity put huge amounts of co2 into the atmosphere. With such a dense atmosphere there is no place for the heat to go. It's not the carbon dioxide, it's the sheer volume of air.
BTW, studies of exoplanetary systems suggest a very different model for our solar system. It is now believed that Jupiter moved well in toward the Sun at some point, threatening to become a "hot Jupiter" as is familiar in so many exosystems. It moved back outward, but in the process roiled the solar system, and kept any "superEarths" from sticking around (as we see them in other star systems.) See here for more. This explains why Mars is so small and there is only the asteroid belt where a planet should be. It also offers an explanation of the bombardment of the early solar system by objects that left the moon looking like a smallpox victim; Jupiter's gravity slung a bunch of debris outward, debris which eventually found it's way back into the inner system. While Jupiter was too far out to stop the Venusian rotation, one wonders if it, coupled with the pull of the Sun, didn't have some effect? And of course one of the objects tossed out by Jupiter may have hit Venus.
Yes, Venus suffered from positive feedback, but there was a lot more going on that just rising carbon dioxide levels.
We don't understand clouds. It is feared that the water vapor levels will rise on Earth leading to runaway greenhouse effects, but it's also known that clouds form from water vapor and that acts to cool the planet. The models just assume the extra water in the air will warm it - an assumption we cannot make. They worry about a discharge of methane from the polar regions but we have no reason to suspect that either; certainly the South polar region is butt-numbingly cold and even if temperatures rise on average a few degrees that isn't going to change anything. Even the north polar region is cold enough to remain frozen where there is permafrost; there just aren't enough warm days to really thaw it out. And don't forget; warmer means more snow will fall in these areas, which means a higher albedo (reflectivity). It doesn't snow much where it is REALLY cold, but a warmer world will change that.
In short, it is anti-science to say the matter is settled, as the purveyors of doomsday global warming so often do. We know far too little about a great many things to assume the worst. Earth has had much more carbon dioxide in her atmosphere in the past without appreciable warming - as much as ten times the amount we see today. We are, in fact, in a relatively low carbon era.
Atheists, agnostics, and people who purport to be "rationalists" used to laugh at the religious doomsayers who predicted the Apocalypse, yet now they are doing the exact same thing, but without any claims to supernatural knowledge. And they claim WE are anti-science!
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
10:08 PM
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